Google's Postini clogs email in US, UK

Google's Postini email security and spam filtering system is seriously clogged, with businesses on both sides of the Atlantic complaining that the hosted service is slow to deliver their messages.

As of 2:30pm Pacific, it appears that the problem has lasted for several hours. Jeff Wojciechowski - LAN/WAN telephony admin for Midland Paper Company, a Postini user based in Wheeling, Illinois - tells the The Reg that employees first started to complain of delays at 5:30am Pacific. The Reg first received a complaint from the UK at 10am Pacific.

"Postini titsup? Or at least one tit up?" asked Greg Mortimer of Bingham McCutchen LLP in London. "Postini is suffering some fairly major outage at the moment, causing mail backups and delays. It's not totally down, but delivery is sporadic at best."

Google has acknowledge the problem, but it prefers not to call it an outage and it indicates the problem is limited to the US. "We're aware of an issue that's causing a delay in mail delivery for some Postini customers in the US, and are working to fix it as quickly as possible," reads a statement from the company. "We know how important mail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and apologize for the inconvenience."

The company encourages users to seek additional information from the Postini support portal here. But according to posts to the Web2.0rhea service Twitter, some users are having trouble accessing the portal. Great....logging into postini support page and getting 'Too many connections' message," writes one user.

Jeff Wojciechowski of Midland Paper tried phoning the company but was unable to reach a live person after two hours on hold. According to Wojciechowski, the delays affected inbound traffic from some domains but not others. "Some domains get passed through and others don't," he tells us. Gmail, Yahoo!, and Hotmail messages, he says, were all slow to arrive.

Google acquired Postini - which offers email security, spam filtering, and archiving tools - in September of 2007. Today's downtime/delay following closely-watched outages over at Google's Gmail and News services. "Having downtime is just really not a option," one Postini user Tweeted today. "Google needs to get it's [sic] act together." ®